People think I'm educated because I talk and write well, but the fact is I never finished high school. I've read a lot, is all.

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

The loss of a sexual life is one of the worst things about getting really old. The worst thing.

The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.

My husband regarded my prison past as a dirty secret and never asked me one single question about it. But what I had experienced and witnessed was eating at me and I needed to "tell somebody."

I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts.